'Italian? It's all Greek to me' says amnesiac swimmer

Police have uncovered the true identity of a man with amnesia found swimming off a Dubai beach eight months ago and treated in a psychiatric hospital.

5:46PM BST 15 Apr 2011

Italian Andrea Pecora, 31 and single, believed for months that he was a 25-year-old Greek footballer called Andreas Kostantinidis, The National newspaper reported on Friday.

It said that Pecora's true identity was finally determined after he remembered the hotel where he had been staying.

The mystery was solved when police found Mr Pecora's passport copy in the guest records of a hotel after partial memories finally came back to the patient at Amal (meaning hope in Arabic) psychiatric hospital.

"We never gave up hope. We knew that one day our search and investigation efforts would pay off," said Ahmad al-Merri, head of criminal investigations at Dubai police.

His mother, who is of Greek origin, told Dubai police she thought her frequent-traveller son was in Africa.

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"When we told him some names from his family he went quiet and started thinking. You could tell they meant something to him, but he could not locate them," Merri said, quoted in the English-language Emirati daily.

In August, the man who was rescued from the sea in a state of confusion had told The National: "I would not forget my country: It is in my heart, just like my name."

His brother is expected to travel to Dubai to take Pecora back to Italy.